The sacred moments,
the moments of miracle,
are often the everyday moments.
~Frederick Buechner from The Magnificent Defeat
Morning breaks everyday
sacred, miraculous,
and leaves me breathless
and heart-full.
Tag: Sabbath
The Loneliest of Places
This land changes you if you let it…
There is no place to hide here
from yourself and what you fear.
The meadowlark will break your heart
the magpie steal your breakfast
and once you’ve seen the buffalo graze on Sage Creek
they will rumble through your dreams forever.
Diane Weddington in Badlands III
It seems hopelessness may be all that thrives in this loneliest of places where wind chews at the rocks. But there is toughness and remarkable color and diversity too. Hope cannot die where the sunrise and sunset create a portrait of paradise for a few brief minutes twice each day.
Yet despite it all grass grows here, in patches and strips, pulling moisture from the thin topsoil veneer.
It is a promise — even the barren can bear fruit.
Ordinary Sunday
Sometimes I have loved the peacefulness of an ordinary Sunday.
It is like standing in a newly planted garden after a warm rain.
You can feel the silent and invisible life.
~Marilynne Robinson from Gilead
As I am covered with Sabbath rest
quiet and deep
as if being planted in soil
just warming from a too long winter~
I know there is nothing ordinary
about what is happening.
I am called by the Light
to push out against darkness,
reaching to the sky
touched by the Source of all
that makes me thrive.
Nothing more extraordinary
than an ordinary Sunday.
The Threshold Between Heaven and Earth
“I know for a while again
the health of self-forgetfulness,
looking out at the sky through
a notch in the valleyside,
the black woods wintry on
the hills, small clouds at sunset
passing across. And I know
that this is one of the thresholds
between Earth and Heaven,
from which even I may step
forth and be free.”
– Wendell Berry from “Sabbath Poems”
The Air Sighs
When, in the cavern darkness, the child
first opened his mouth (even before
his eyes widened to see the supple world
his lungs had breathed into being),
could he have known that breathing
trumps seeing? Did he love the way air sighs
as it brushes in and out through flesh
to sustain the tiny heart’s iambic beating,
tramping the crossroads of the brain
like donkey tracks, the blood dazzling and
invisible, the corpuscles skittering to the earlobes
and toenails? Did he have any idea it
would take all his breath to speak in stories
that would change the world?
~Luci Shaw “Breath”
Breath that created the world
by forming the Words
that tell the stories
that change the world.
We rest in that breath today,
sighing in Sabbath.
Reconciled Trembling
I am the rest between two notes,
which are somehow always in discord
because Death’s note wants to climb over—
but in the dark interval, reconciled,
they stay there trembling.
And the song goes on, beautiful.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke from “My Life is Not This Steeply Sloping Hour”
On Mondays I often feel I’m the spot in the middle between discordant notes. There is on one side of me the pressure of catch-up from what was left undone through the weekend and on the other side is the anticipated demand of the coming week. Before I arrive to work, I’m uneasily in dead center, immobilized by the unknown ahead and the known behind.
This moment of rest in the present, between the trembling past and future, is my moment of reconciliation, my Sabbath extended. This morning I allow myself an instant of silence and reflection before I surge ahead into the week, knowing that on my journey I’ll inevitably hit wrong notes, but it can be beautiful nevertheless.
Even the least harmonious notes find reconciliation within the next chord. I now move from the rest of my Sabbath back into the rhythm of my life.
Trembling, still trembling.
Austere Love
“Sundays too my father got up early
And put his clothes on in the blueback cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?”
– Robert Hayden, Those Winter Sundays
Cozy Rain
The best kind of rain, of course, is a cozy rain. This is the kind … of rain that falls on a day when you’d just as soon stay in bed a little longer, write letters or read a good book by the fire, take early tea with hot scones and jam, and look out the streaked window with complacency.
~ Susan Allen Toth
Cozy rains simply don’t happen on weekdays. There are always things to do, places to be, people to impress, rain or shine. On weekdays rain tends to be a drag us down, smotheringly gray inconvenience of wet shoes, damp jackets, impossibly limp hair in school and work place.
But Saturday? The same drops from the same cloudy skies become a comfy, tuck-me-in-once-again and snuggle down kind of rain. There is no schedule to follow, no structured day, no required attendance, no need to even poke our nose out the door (unless living on a farm with hungry animals in the barn).
This is why most northwest natives are rainyphilics, anticipating this quiet time of year with great longing. We are granted permission by precipitation to be complacent, slowed down, contemplative, and yes, even lazy…
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Okay, enough of that. Gotta get up, get going, laundry to do, house to clean, barn to muck out, bills to pay, meals to prepare.
Maybe tomorrow the rain will still be falling and there will be a chance to sit with hot tea cup in hand, gazing through streaked windows.
Cozy rain on a Sabbath Sunday. With scones. And jam.
Bliss.
Emergent Relaxation
On pretty weekends in the summer, the riverbank is the very verge of the modern world… On those weekends, the river is disquieted from morning to night by people resting from their work. This resting involves traveling at great speed, first on the road and then on the river. The people are in an emergency to relax. They long for the peace and quiet of the great outdoors. Their eyes are hungry for the scenes of nature. They go very fast in their boats. They stir the river like a spoon in a cup of coffee. They play their radios loud enough to hear above the noise of their motors. They look neither left nor right. They don’t slow down for – or maybe even see – an old man in a rowboat raising his lines…
Wendell Berry in Jayber Crow
I sometimes feel a desperate urgency to relax, the need to get away from every day troubles sticking to me like velcro. But my agenda-filled escape would be too loud, too fast, too contrived instead of a time of winding down, slowing, quieting, observing and wondering.
Life is not an emergency so I must stop reacting as if someone just pulled an alarm. I seek the peace and quiet of nature, settling myself into rhythms of daylight and nightfall, awake and asleep, hungry and filled, thirsty and sated.
So I breathe deeply, and remember in my bones:
a pause to rest is gift enough. It is up to me to make it so, and so then it goes.
Barnstorming 